Blue Compote c. 1936

Edward White’s ‘Blue Compote’ captures a glass dish in watercolor, and honestly, it feels like he was really *seeing* blue. The whole piece hums with it! It is a meditation on a single color. You can almost feel him mixing those blues, adding water, letting the pigment bloom on the paper. I wonder if he was chasing the way light moves through glass. The brushstrokes are soft, suggestive, trying to capture an illusion. I’m thinking about Giorgio Morandi. He also spent his life painting the same bottles and jars over and over, each time trying to see something new. And that’s what painting is, right? You look, you try, you fail, you try again. It’s a conversation between you and the thing you’re painting. The artist is in a constant exchange of ideas across time, inspiring creativity and allowing multiple interpretations.